Return of the son of last week's comment thread

Not to get too incestuous on this blog, but I sorta did promise to return to a certain discussion from last week. You know, the one that cropped up in this post, but simultaneously seemed to cry out for its own space.

Quick summary: it's basically a version of the old "recorded music vs. live music" debate. Mr. G and Steve smartly posited the superiority of the latter, while I attempted to argue for the value of both. (Apologies if I am misrepresenting.)

In an effort to get right back into that moment, and to cut off this damned preamble before it goes too far, can we just pretend that what follows is a natural extension of the previous comment thread?

Mr. G: I think it behooves us as musicians to remind folk how canned music is to music as canned peaches are to peaches, and they should re-gain the ears to hear that, and thus demand live music.

Durkin: Again, I'm a big fan of live music, and I agree we need to find ways to increase its presence in the world. But canned music is not to music as canned peaches are to peaches. "Canned music" (if we must call it that) is to music as apples are to oranges.

If, when listening to recorded music, your main question is, "How much does this sound like live music?" then of course you are in for disappointment. It's the wrong question to ask. The authenticity battle is a battle that engineers can never win (and so sound system ads that tout verisimilitude are disingenuous).

Which, by the way, is not to say that live music has a more convincing prior claim on authenticity. What seat do you have to be sitting in to get the "real" symphony? Which concert hall? Which orchestra and conductor does it have to be? What edition of the score should be used? What state of mind do you have to be in? What time of day does it have to be?

It's no disrespect to live music to wonder these things. But that's the problem with the "live" vs. "recorded" debate: we harbor all kinds of anxieties about "technology" (defined pretty narrowly), and so recorded music is regularly scrutinized to see if it passes the "real thing" test, and found wanting because it doesn't. Live music, we assume, is just "music" -- pure, unmediated, undifferentiated, and never filtered by the acoustic idiosyncrasies of the context in which it is heard, or even by the physical and/or psychological biases of its listeners! (Huh?)

Mr. G: As musicians we need to remember that Mintons was Monk, it was a place, it was the place and it was made special by the presence of the living Monk. Place the best Japanese Import LP in a glass case, it just ain't the same. The place is where the living music happened.

Durkin: Sure. But my childhood bedroom, where I spent long hours listening to music on headphones, deep into the night, was also a place. The music I discovered there sure felt alive to me. That's a testament to the records that were involved (many of which I wouldn't really understand until later) -- because with most of them the possibility of ever experiencing their content as actual "living music" had long past.

Mr. G: if music was simply wiggly air, then sound systems would work. What you and I hear, as musicians, is different than what the average person hears because you and I colour what we hear with prior experience. In other words, we imagine most of what we hear on records because we know what it really sounds like. Thus I can listen to old cylinder and victrola recordings and get really excited about the composition and musicianship, whereas everyone I have ever lived near (save a few, musicians all of them) will say "Turn Off That Noise!"

Durkin: Yes, as musicians we fill in a lot of the details when we listen to recordings (though see above reference to records I loved but didn't understand when I first heard them). However, many recordings have a beautiful sound unto themselves. Cylinder recordings are a pretty extreme counterexample, of course, but, for instance, I adore the creepy sound of the original 1928 version of "The Mooche" ("squashed" and "noisy" though it is by modern standards). In fact, I don't think I have ever heard a version I like better. In such cases (and there are many of them) the recorded sound is, for all intents and purposes, a compositional gesture.



More broadly, the recording studio, and recording technology in general -- as the "techno kids" you rightly admire know full well -- is just another instrument. It's a machine that produces sound, just like a trumpet, or an accordion, or a kazoo...

Mr. G: If it is all just filtered sound, everyone should be used to it, like how they all see circles where the eyes nearly always see ellipses, it needn't be a learned thing. Everyone has heard sound filtered through doors, through hats, through distorter muffs of all sorts, yet you play a soundsystem in a subway, you get sneers, you play a guitar, you get smiles. You play a brassband record out your shop window, you get nada, but the Hypnotic Brass plays a street corner and people (who cannot see them) swerve from blocks away to investigate the marvelous 'sound'.

Durkin: This seems to me to be a pretty broad generalization. I have personal experience with friends playing guitars in subways, only to be met with rolling eyes, and then to be escorted out a few minutes later by cops who certainly weren't smiling. And anyone who has been to a discotheque, or a rave, or any other environment that is driven by DJs and sound systems (and the cultures that surround them), knows that whatever "sneering" happens in those contexts is typically unrelated the source of the music.

Both recorded and live music are filtered, inevitably. And so they will remain -- at least until we figure out a way to beam songs directly into each other's brains.

[Photo credit: Eva101]

Hither and thither

Stuff collected and collated from various points:

* Another Industrial Jazz Group quintet tune.

* Another shaving video.

* The latest IJG October tour (aka "Rocktober") itinerary. Gigantic thanks to Nate Trier for securing our eighth official gig -- an October 20 hit at the Space with Nate's band the Skamatix. Should be an awesome time! (We still have two more dates to add to the tour: October 18 and October 21 -- cuz, you know, things are not quite insane enough yet. Anyway, stay tuned.)

* The re-animation of a presumed-dead blog post! Tour tales no. 1: The wages of profanity and political commentary, a story of one band's adventures with the word "fuck," was dumped in this space nearly a year ago. It was recently revisited, with insightful commentary, by our new friend (and fellow blogger) Tim Kitz. Definitely worth reading -- not least for the story of how Tim ended up finding this blog. Thanks, Tim!

* A nice video about the demise of the music industry (nothing particularly new here, but worth viewing for Zappa's typically wry analysis):



* And, speaking of Zappa, here's FZ alum Mike Keneally's newest video / song:

Classical gas

Earlier this week I got an email from Doug Jenkins, leader of Portland's own (logically enough, given their name) Portland Cello Project.

I love it when gig emails from groups I really dig make me laugh out loud! Let's see if you have the same reaction. Here's an excerpt:

Sometimes I write emails for the Cello Project list, and right after I send them I think “oops – that one might earn a few ‘unsubscribe’ responses.” Generally this is the case if I do something like talk about Britney Spears too much, or something. I forget that some people don’t think pop music is as simultaneously silly, ridiculous, joyful and compelling as I do... It’s just a good break from all the serious music you have to play when you’re a cellist, especially in the summer with wedding gigs and all of this other stuff...

I always want to write back to the people who unsubscribe and say "but... I’ve been practicing the Chopin sonata all day – this pop music thing is just my escape – I promise I just got carried away for a second with the ironic pop music references!"

Anyway, this email INESCAPABLY revolves around getting carried away with the ironic pop music references, so, if that’s not your thing, you may as well stop reading right now!

Who among us in the jazz world, with its overblown anxieties about audience, art, and entertainment, could fail to appreciate these sentiments?

Of course, our overblown anxieties may be quite different from what a classical cellist experiences in a group like the PCP. Perhaps classical music, with its centuries-long backstory as "serious art," at least provides its practitioners with a clear choice: different contexts require the wearing of different hats, and it's particularly obvious when those hats are being mixed up. You get asked to play classical music at a wedding, for instance, and you can be reasonably sure that you are being asked to be "serious" (even if you are being asked to do it in the background). And because audience expectations about classical music are so deeply ingrained, using a group of cellos to play music ostensibly designed for "entertainment" (especially when it's not the Beatles, or other stuff that routinely gets covered by pops orchestras) is probably still a pretty surprising gesture, relatively speaking.



Playing pop (or pop-inflected) music in a jazz ensemble is a different animal altogether. We've forgotten which hat is which. People like me complain a lot about how jazz has almost completely lost touch with its roots in the brothels and rathskellers; and to a certain extent, those complaints are justified -- clearly the era of Jazz, the Institution is now upon us. But the real "problem" (which may not be a problem at all, except for those who seek clarity in their art) is just that jazz is taxonomically confusing. We jazzers know what we like, but we don't really know for sure whether what we create is "art" or "entertainment." (Quick: you get asked to play jazz at a wedding! What exactly are you being hired to do?)

As I say, such confusion may not be a problem at all, in the grand scheme of things. In fact, as a committed Dada-ist, I love it. On the other hand, clarity about genre helps to sell records.

* * * * *

Anyway, for those of you here in Portland, the PCP is performing this Saturday at the Doug Fir Lounge. I have seen them before, and can heartily attest to the wonderfulness that is their show. It usually features a rotating cast of collaborators, drifting in and out of the group from all directions, making for a very lovely two-hour-or-so smorgasbord.

If you don't believe me, I urge you to check out the audience hooting and hollering in the above video.

[Photo credit: Alicia Rose]

RIAA breaks guitars, and music in general

So the court came down hard on Tenenbaum. Fuck. I was hoping the trial would last at least a week.

There are so many things to say about this. There's the idea that the punishment is excessive (Steve Lawson was one of the first to point out that $22K per MP3 is a complete joke). There's the idea that the record industry continues to fight against inevitable change, instead of working hard and in good faith to develop a viable business model that takes into account new technology, the livelihood of musicians, and the needs of audiences. And there's the idea that none of this will do what the RIAA appears to believe it will do -- specifically, intimidate other music fans into giving up "filesharing" altogether.

That last bit is key. Let me say it again, in a slightly different way: this case is not going to have much (or any) effect on the day-to-day lives of music fans -- except perhaps to galvanize them against the industry a bit more. So it's basically a very damaging exercise in futility, a lashing-out, a naked and spiteful display of power by an already-doomed giant. If this is a "war," as Debbie Rosenbaum says, it looks to me like Vietnam. "Filesharers" (i.e., most of us) are the Viet Cong, and the record industry is the US military-industrial-congressional complex, throwing massive amounts of firepower at the enemy, and finding itself flummoxed when a whack-a-mole dynamic ensues.

The fate of the twentieth century version of the music industry, as represented by the RIAA, is sealed. No matter how anti-social human beings may get, you cannot prevent them from sharing stuff they like, especially when the technologies to facilitate sharing are so ubiquitous. And so this trial was an expression of a strategy that has already failed. Mr. Tenenbaum, unfortunately for him, is collateral damage.

* * * * *

Incidentally, I find myself wondering why no musicians were singled out by the RIAA Dragnet. Surely musicians steal music too? Don't we? (Yes, I'm talking to you, fellow jazzers. Don't tell me no one has ever burned you a copy of a CD.) What would a musician have done in the face of one of those pompous subpoenas? How would a musician have "fought back"?

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I think I know how I would have approached things. (Not that the trial would have had a different outcome.)

Mostly, I would have wanted to look the court in the eye, at some particularly dramatic moment, and ask: "Do you really love music?" Assuming the answer was "yes," I'd go on: "Do you want more of it in the world? Would more good music, on balance, be a good thing for the planet?" Assuming the answer was again "yes," I'd go on some more: "Where do you think good music comes from? A vacuum?"

And if the answer to that was also "yes," I'd know I was dealing with the assumption that musical brilliance springs full-blown from the mind of genius composers who lock themselves in musty attics for years on end, and whose output does not depend upon interaction with a vibrant, accessible musical culture. I'd have to go into a long rant about an opposing (and, in my opinion, more accurate) theory: that in order to make good new music, musicians have to be knowledgeable about already existing music, and being knowledgeable about already existing music (especially on a typical musician's income) sometimes means that it has to be passed around for free.

I'd point out that biographical data usually suggests that, at some point, developing musicians have access to a public and / or private social context in which they can hear a good deal of high-quality music. Everyone knows, for instance, about Louis Armstrong, and the public music making that occurred in the New Orleans of his youth (parades, funerals and other social events). I'd talk about Bach and Zappa, and any number of my other heroes and heroines, and how they depended upon the existence of a public sphere for music, and to the extent that they couldn't get music that way, and to the extent that they couldn't purchase it, they too had to "steal" it. Sheee-yit, there was filesharing way before Kazaa.

Oh, I'd school those highly-paid, tone-deaf lawyers. I'd argue that, yes, musicians need to be remunerated for their work (not that you were ever very good at making that happen, dear RIAA!), but if you try to make sharing impossible (and that's what's at the bottom of the industry's slippery slope, isn't it?) you're going to end up with a musical culture that is a whole lot less interesting and creative.

I'd talk about how it's not about not paying for music if you can (something no true fan would ever even consider), it's about not automatically being denied music just because you can't. It's about ensuring the existence of a "musical commons" (part of the "intangible commons of the mind"), which doesn't have to include all music, but which has to exist, and which, as a commons, should be accessible regardless of one’s economic resources.

(To clarify that "slippery slope" crack, I'd argue that the RIAA, with its infernal DMCAs, and its confounded Sonny Bono Copyright Acts, its craptacular DRM technologies, and so on, has, since this nonsense started 10 years ago, been pushing toward a totally proprietary listening environment -- the complete and precise opposite of a musical commons.)

What else? I'd talk about the generally lame state of music education in the US, and how that further depletes the musical commons.

And then, for good measure, I'd point out that the framers of the Constitution thought copyright should be used to attract people to a life in the arts and sciences by providing a material incentive -- which is different than saying that copyright should reward the hoarding of intellectual property as if it was a scarce good. Copyright was designed to promote creativity, not to divide musical culture up into little fiefdoms.

And finally, as they carried me out of the courtroom, kicking and screaming (I presume), I'd leave them with this bombastic recap: if you think music can optimally continue in an environment in which the act of sharing is technically, officially, and legally verboten, you're kidding yourselves!

[Photo credit: mercredis]

Don't you ever play a rumba?

Along the lines of "The Job Song" as you've never heard it, I present the little ditty that resides in the first half of this clip: "The Wave-a-Stick Blues." C/o Jill.

I guess any job can become a drag if you let it...

Ozzie Nelson and His Orchestra

More Friday Morning Economic Meltdown Music, and Other Stuff Too

Part of a continuing series.



Signs of recovery? Don't ask me, I'm not an economist.

Meanwhile, over at the other blog:

New Quadraphonnes.

Live Fight the Big Bull.

Old Industrial Jazz Group.

The eternal frame

As I continue to work through the details of the Industrial Jazz Group's upcoming east coast tour, and the logistical and fiscal realities of that operation come into greater focus, I keep coming back to a question about audience.

I'm pretty sure we're going to get a good turnout of fellow musicians for our shows (we usually do), but when it comes to music-fans-who-are-fans-only -- i.e., non-musicians or amateur musicians, who actively and regularly invest in the music they like -- how are we gonna get more of this latter group to give the IJG experience a try?

It's a question with ramifications both narrowly selfish and practical (we need to expand our audience or I am gonna lose my shirt) and broadly philosophical (where will jazz be in ten years if jazz musicians / academics / critics are, and continue to be, the primary jazz fans?).

Of course, those philosophical ramifications are probably only relevant if, as I guess I'm assuming, jazz is in danger of becoming a closed system.

Not that closed systems are necessarily bad for audience development. They seem to work in sports, for instance. Consider: most sports fans participate in a given sport before becoming fans of it. For many, the process of becoming a fan -- following a given team, going to games regularly, buying the merchandise, investing in the activity -- is a way of maintaining an interest in the sport, especially once an individual discovers that he or she can't (or doesn't want to) play it professionally (for whatever reason).

Alas, in jazz, this model seems to break down somewhat. For one thing, fewer people are interested in playing jazz than are interested in playing sports. (Right?) And of those who become interested in playing jazz, I would bet that a higher percentage stick with it as a career (particularly once they get as far as forking over hard-earned cash for an expensive music degree). The process creates a glut of professionals, and fewer jazz-savvy non-professionals to consume the stuff the professionals produce.

Which just takes us back to the original problem.

The thing that may be difficult for jazz musicians (actually, musicians in general, but jazz musicians in particular) to get a handle on is that most fans, regardless of how much they might be "purely" inclined toward certain music on its own terms, and regardless of how much they may or may not even realize this underlying dynamic, simultaneously want a story -- a context or frame for their listening. And not just any story / context / frame, but the right one; something compelling, that helps to draw people in or galvanize their listening experience.

Isn't that kind of what liner notes used to do?

For instance, with jazz, one of those stories -- one of the compelling contexts / frames that attracted listeners who were not necessarily also players, or professional players -- used to be the countercultural narrative: the idea that jazz was part of a quirky (or dangerous, or exciting) alternative to the American (consumerist, bourgeois) mainstream -- including, eventually, the "commodified counterculture" that characterized much rock. (Note that such stories don't necessarily have to be true to be effective.) I know that's what attracted me, long before I actually had the chutzpah to try studying or playing or writing jazz. Jazz was an expression of rebellion, and it intersected with so many of the other rebellious narratives of my youth (both personal and cultural).

It seems almost silly and quaint now to make this observation, because jazz has since been championed by forces that are anything but countercultural (if indeed anything can be "countercultural" anymore). But going back all the way to the beginning, that story was at least occasionally an important part of the way jazz reached outside its base (to the extent that it reached outside its base at all). I'm not even sure how conscious it was (probably not very), but it worked.

And so (talk about "jazz of the future"!) what story or context or frame has replaced (or will replace) the old one(s)? What compelling conversations about or around jazz will appeal to those who are not themselves already intimately bound up in the art form?

If you're already making great music, and you can answer these questions, then congratulations! You win.

[Image credit: Rodrigo Baptista]

A big fat pain in the ass

If you haven't yet read Joel Tenenbaum's essay, How It Feels to be Sued for $4.5m," you probably should.

Tenenbaum is one of the 30,000 random people the RIAA decided to sue for copyright infringement a few years back. His is the second case to go to trial (here is the first), and things got going in earnest this past Monday. You can follow developments via this website, or (of course) via Twitter.

One wonders if anyone at the RIAA is thinking ahead, following this chain of events to its logical conclusion. Let's say, for instance, that they win. What then? They get their $4.5m (sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but it's basically a 10% down payment on a one stage for a lousy U2 tour). They deepen the rift with their audience. The basic activities the case is about continue, unabated. Valuable time and energy that could have been spent working on a new business model (something like this, perhaps) are squandered forever.

Last nail, meet coffin.

Anyway, here's Tenenbaum, in his own words:

In 2005, my parents received a letter from Sony BMG, Warner, Atlantic Records, Arista Records, and UMG Records claiming "copyright infringement". They were given a number to call, which was their "settlement information line", a call centre staffed by operators who, we are emphatically told, are "not attorneys". The process of collecting money from these threats was so huge, they had set up a 1-800-DONT-SUE-ME-style call centre.

The operators did little more than ask how you would pay (they wanted $3,000, I believe) and repeated intimidating lawsuit statistics. I sent them a money order for $500, which they returned. I told them I couldn't pay any more. We discussed whether I might qualify for "financial hardship", and then I stopped hearing from them, which I didn't question. I graduated from college and began studying for my physics doctorate.

And then in August 2007, I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. [...]

I had frequent contact with one of their Colorado counsel. While she was impudent to the point of vicious ("Come on Joel, I think you did it"), I continued to use phrases like "I respect your position" and "we have a respectful difference of opinion". I have no record of this intimidation because the person in question made sure to keep contact restricted to phonecalls.

Every conversation consisted of her trying to get information out of me about my defense, telling me how much bigger the settlement would be if I didn't settle now. Shaken, I would call my mother, who was a state-paid lawyer in child custody cases, and ask her what to do. We blindly fired all kinds of motions at them. Eventually my mother became afraid to answer my calls, worried it would be about the case. For the court "settlement" I offered $5,250, which the RIAA declined, asking $10,500. I saw myself on a conveyor belt, being pulled inexorably toward the meshing of razor-sharp gears.

[...]

My sisters, dad and mother have all been deposed. My high-school friends, friends of the family too. My computer's been seized and hard drive copied, and my parents and sister narrowly escaped the same fate for their computers. And the professor who supervises my teaching is continually frustrated with my need to have people cover for me, while my research in grad school is put on hold to deal with people whose full-time job is to keep an anvil over my head. I have to consider every unrelated thing I do in my private life in the event that I'm interrogated under oath about it. I wonder how I'll stand up in a courtroom for hours having litigators try to convince a jury of my guilt and the reprehensibility of my character.

Jazz of the Future

RIP George Russell.

RIP, also, to the days when jazz could be the subject of its own television show, in which viewers would be invited to understand its present and ponder its future. You know: the good old forward-thinking days.

(Now that the future is here, does that sort of old-time optimism seem quaint to you? I sure hope not. Even the future needs a future.)

Hot Dogs

Something must be wrong. I had been pondering the sad possibility that I could look forward to less and less truly mind-blowing music as I got older. I felt like an addict who had suddenly been denied his drug.

And then, as if to prove that there actually is a deity (yeah, right), and that he/she/it is capricious as all get out (more likely), I come across not one but three amazing artists in the space of as many weeks (give or take a few days).

First: Electric Ladyland. Wow.

Next: Django Bates. Wow. (And another one of those weird instances where I have somehow previously missed actually hearing the music of a major artist working the same side of the street as the Industrial Jazz Group. Duh! (Thanks to DJA for the tip.))

And now, thanks to Casa de Durkin-Robinson, which I have touted as a home-away-from-home for IJG members passing through Portland with their various other groups, the third band in this personal okay-so-music-is-not-really-dead-after-all triumvirate: Wiener Kids, from Oakland. The group is led by drummer Jordan Glenn (who writes all of their music), and features Aram Shelton and (IJG's) Cory Wright on reeds. When they made their way up to the Pacific Northwest last weekend, for shows in PDX, Eugene, and Seattle, they crashed here for a night.

And now is the point in the post where you click on the previous link and go listen to their music over on MySpace.

I'm luckier than that. I got to see their show at galleryHOMELAND (along with an equally strong set by PDX's own Better Homes and Gardens) on Saturday night.

Here's a short video by Michael Buchino; it captures one of the more introspective moments of the show:



Of course (as Michael notes), that sort of thing (still beautiful) was more the exception than the rule at this show. The rule was more like this:



That video (and the one below) are (apparently) from a previous incarnation of the group.



You can find more stuff on your own. Anyway, for me the appeal here is at least in part the same thing that perked up my ear with Acoustic Ladyland -- a real capacity for doing "more with less" (you know the cliche). An ability, in other words, to pare away all the potential wankery, and go straight to the idiosyncratic core. The tunes are simple, direct, short -- like good punk rock, I guess. And yet, unlike bad punk rock, they're not stupid and boring. And they're not really "simple," either.

* * * * *

My only regret of the evening is that I was unable to get over to hear Mike Richardson's indie rock extravaganza, the Minor Canon, which actually happened to be playing PDX the same evening (also on tour). I am quite sure they were totally bitchen, and my regrets should be duly noted. (At first it looked like there would be a schedule conflict, as both bands were slated to go on at the same time in different parts of town. As things turned out, the Minor Canon ended up going on way too late for my heat-stroke afflicted body. Blah blah blah. Anyway, sorry Mike.)

Faking it

Sometimes I feel like my whole career boils down to / can be summed up as a musical version of this.

Of course, I wonder if there is anyone working in jazz (or music) today who doesn't occasionally feel that way about their own stuff? Like we're all pale reflections?

Maybe, like marketers, all musicians are liars? Pay no attention to whatever's going on behind the curtain! Just buy my damned record!

Of course, in another sense, musicians speak the truth like nobody's business. Testifying is a key part of what we do. And it's a kind of truth you won't get anywhere else.

Sorry to be so cryptic this morning. I'm just free-associating between sips of coffee.

Freelancing, part two

A post on "Grabby McGee," my latest contribution to the PJCE.

Soup of the day

If nothing else, running a big band teaches you to think about twenty-five things at once (your mileage may vary, of course).

One of the things I am thinking about right now (in addition to thinking about the upcoming tour, and also thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch) is this:

How exactly am I going to release the next record?

I have pondered a variation of this issue before, of course, but this time out, I'm not so concerned with the optimum media / packaging for the release.

I'm concerned with the possibility that maybe there ain't no such thing!

Peter Kirn, in responding to a pretty awesome Wired article on the many ways musicians are diversifying the things they produce (bringing real creativity into the "product" side of the music business), has this to say:

From soup cans to music boxes to iPhone apps, there are a few underlying trends in there. One is experimentation in the delivery mechanism itself (including 8-tracks and cassettes, really). The other is in what you can do with the media, as with the interactive remixable iTunes album, or even art books that extend what an album actually is.

As these spread, though, I have to optimistically think that this is more than desperation or brief novelty. Distribution media haven’t just shifted from one popular form to another; they’ve imploded. We’re rapidly approaching a “minority majority” situation in which no one format dominates the others. We haven’t gone from the compact cassette to the CD to the MP3. We’ve gone from the CD to MP3s, MP4s, lossless files for aficionados and lossy streams for kids who love on-demand, vintage formats, physical media and art books and software. Instead of being strange anomalies, these other formats may actually be the new normal. I think in a way the business model doesn’t matter, because, let’s face it, a lot of art making is about losing money. What drives artists is loving sharing the thing they’re making, and finding someone who wants to love it, too. Some people will make a great business model around that, while others won’t.

But if you’re a music lover, we could be facing a new golden age.

Well, this is just awesome. Am I crazy to think these remarks hint at the possibility of a true musical pluralism (aka "minority majority")? Am I crazy to think that worrying about selling the packaging -- which is the basic problem the folks on the Wired list are trying to solve, since nowadays the music itself is always already free, for all intents and purposes -- am I crazy to think that that is better (and less artistically harmful) than worrying about selling the music?

No, I am not. In the past, with (almost) each new technological development, the music industry has been able to respond with the PR spin of "here is the new standard." And for the most part, everyone had to fall in line if they wanted to compete. (And when it comes to art, what's more problematic than falling in line?)

Now (or soon), you make the music you want to make, come up with as many ways to package it as you can think of (at a whole range of price points), put it out there, and voila! You're off to the races!

Well, okay, maybe it's not that easy (or even that new), but it is exciting.

Now, three questions: what weird or interesting ways would you like to see the next Industrial Jazz Group album packaged? We'll definitely be putting out a straight-up CD, but I'm trying to think beyond that too: what is the IJG equivalent of a soup-can album?

And finally: what am I having for lunch?

[Photo credit: basheertome]

Let's pretend it's Friday

So I can get to that weekly wrap-up post I hinted at earlier.

Ready?

Tany Ling riffs on the mustache theme.

Mike Richardson surprises us all by posting two shaving videos.

Ian Carroll does an engaging stream-of-consciousness thing linking beat-boxing, the national anthem, and Nick Cave.

And Jill Knapp anticipates the "United Breaks Guitars" story by at least a little bit.

Just a little nascent band-blogging from this group I love -- with more to come. Get on over there and heckle these brave pioneers in the comments, won't you?

Oh! This should probably go over there too, but what the hell, I'll stick it here:



What is it? Matt Lichtenwalner's video detailing his process for drawing Telepath, a character from the Uniques comic. Matt accompanied the visuals here with the title track from the IJG's second album, City of Angles.

The thing is fascinating to watch. I'm thinking it would be really cool if one could somehow similarly trace the evolution of a musical score (which is, after all, another kind of drawing). But at the very least the software tool involved seems like it could be employed to great effect in an IJG video someday. Hmmm.

We tweeted about it

Last night's dialogue started off in reference to a comment the great Gunther Schuller made in this interview (which you should also read):

uglyrug G. Schuller: "I wanted to write music that is not written in any way to entertain someone, even though I hope it will be entertaining." Huh?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug he hoped people would enjoy his music but didn't try to write likeable music. He hoped the audience would elevate to appreciate it

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But how could he expect people to enjoy it if it wasn't likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He didn't TRY to make it likeable. He wrote what he wanted and HOPED people would like the result. It's a fine line.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug His process wasn't cluttered with concern for audience reaction. But like all composers he wanted his music to be liked.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But if he wanted it to be likeable... why didn't he try to make it likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He hoped it would be liked but he didn't want to inadvertently censor himself to be liked. He wanted to bring his audience to him.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Is trying to make something that is likeable the same thing as being inauthentic, then?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug No. Different folks have different concepts. I have a tendency to simplify thing because I am in a Univ. setting and want it played

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I have to remind myself to write what I intend to write regardless of playability or audience reaction.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But surely, on some level, you "intend" for some % of the audience to like it? Even if that % is only you, the composer?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug BTW, this is hard to do in 130 character bursts!!!

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Yeah! I'm trying to do it while watching the news. (BTW, Olbermann quote (on Palin): "Twitter rhymes with quitter.")

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I do try to write things I'd like but sometimes it's about writing what's in your head. Good line from Olbermann, BTW.

kctiner @uglyrug @jimmuscomp you guys are cracking me up.

uglyrug @kctiner @jimmuscomp Yeah, that was fun.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug @kctiner that was fun. Now on the road back to Bak-O. Boo-hoo.

Who says twitter is good for nothing?

Somebody get in here and clean this mess up

Alright -- at the behest of my personal assistant (i.e., me), I have decided that I really need to organize the two Durkin / IJG-related blogs.

(I told you I would follow up on this sooner or later, right?)

Background: for about a year now there has been an official "Industrial Jazz Group" blog (unnamed, though I have it listed as "Not Really Industrial, Not Really Jazz" in the sidebar here) over at the group website. That one has, until recently, been a hit-or-miss affair, with posts seeming to cluster around the tours, and with long empty spaces in between. Jill, Matt, and I have all been posting over there, but it's hard to keep up the momentum, because we all have our own blogs elsewhere too.

No sense in having a blog if you ain't gonna use it. And what that one should really do, I think, is give you a little bit broader sampling of the personalities of the many folks in the band. I mean, as I have explained before, there is a special camaraderie in the IJG -- I certainly wouldn't be able to write the music I am writing without knowing and liking the folks who play it. They are a varied, fun, interesting, idiosyncratic bunch. I doubt you will find their like in any other big band working today. In fact, I guarantee it.

In short: you don't need more posts from me. You need more posts from them! And to rectify this imbalance, I've started to encourage them to post stuff over at the IJG blog.

Lo and behold, some of them have started taking me up on that request! (Wow, I love it when shit goes the way I want it to.)

So, cool. I'll see how many IJG members I can get involved, you feel free to poke and prod in the comments, and we'll see where this goes, shall we?

NB: for those of you who have no desire either to add yet another blog to your reader or blogroll (can't blame you for that): I'm going to make this easy by linking (here) to everything posted over there. I'm envisioning sort of a weekly (Friday?) wrap-up JtMoU post to let you know everything that was posted at the IJG blog. And while I will occasionally post there, mostly I will continue doing here what I usually do here. Whatever the fuck that is.

Confusing, eh?

[Photo credit: givepeaceachance]

Why I hate blog posts about hating things

Well, actually, I don't, not really. I kind of dig them, actually, because they provoke discussions, and discussions are good. (I do, however, hate the idea that blog posts should be considered "definitive documents" of a writer's state of mind. For the record, much of what I write here (and in comments at other people's blogs) is a reflection of a thought process, not always a conclusive position. (I am large, I contain multitudes.))

Anyway, here's one post, and here's another, that prompted some unplanned fireworks over the weekend. I added my own commentary at that last link, but as usual, I can't let the shit go, so I wanted to throw in one or two more thoughts here on my home turf.

First is a bit that I discovered in the course of following up, for my own edification, on the subject of female jazz critics. Serendipitously, it serves to unite that subject with the "precision" meme stirred up by Matt Rubin's "Why I Hate Big Bands" post. It is contained in this excerpt from a book I haven't yet read, John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool:

From the violent gangster milieu of jazz's early sporting life environs; to the urbane, stylized machismo of the jazz-inflected New Frontier; to Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch's tendentious feminization of the 1960s counterculture; jazz culture has been dominated by masculinist voices and sensibilities. I've noted in this book several important instances in which male critics have buttressed their masculinist authority by distancing themselves from sentimental attachments to the popular music of their youth. This feeds a larger pattern in which jazz's reputed high art autonomy and profundity are complemented by a concept of criticism that stresses taut discipline, rationality, and judiciousness -- qualities assumed to be part of a masculine intellectual seriousness set off from the infantilized and feminized emotional realm of mass popular culture.

I'm not sure I agree with these assessments totally, but I think Gennari is at least productively interested in the "why" question (i.e., why are there so few female jazz critics?) in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. So now I have to read his book, I guess.

(Gennari also reminded me of Helen Oakley Dance, an early glass-ceiling-breaker. I actually read a bit of her work in grad school, and am duly chagrined about my subsequent oversight.)

Also: I was very flattered that James Hirschfeld brought up the infernal Industrial Jazz Group as an instance of an "imprecise" big band (James' comment can also be found at Darcy's post, linked above).

Here is how I hinted at our ensemble concept in one of my posts about our European tour (May 2007):

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of our portion of the evening (confirmed later when I started working my way through the recording) was the emergence of a unified looseness in the group sound. In the past I have generally aimed for precision when it came to the execution of my written charts. I have tended to shy away from recording the band's live performances, because I was always concerned with things staying as "close to the ink" as possible... and the ink is, well, difficult to execute. But I have never subscribed to the "benevolent dictator" model of the composer-conductor, and I think everyone in the band has known that, and with this show there was a strange transmogrification of the set, in that the majority of the players knew the music well enough to be able to play it as if it were all improvised. In other words, the group as a whole started to develop some of the suppleness -- in terms of well-placed and judicious interpretive liberties that never sacrificed the cohesion of a given piece -- that is usually only possible in a smaller configuration (a quartet or quintet, say). They owned the music -- an exceedingly difficult thing to do in a big band setting. Once again, my hat is off to the cats involved: I am humbled and in awe.

"Unified looseness," "well-placed and judicious interpretive liberties that never sacrifice the cohesion of a given piece," and playing the music "as if it were all improvised": still a pretty accurate description of what we do.

Possibly related: with the IJG, I have long been after what Ben Watson, in describing Zappa's early Mothers recordings, called "pachuco charm." Sort of punk, and sort of big band, all at once.

On Acoustic Ladyland

Over at the other blog. (You're still waiting for an explanation for that one, aren't you? It's forthcoming, I swear. And yes, I promise said explanation won't involve you having to update your links.)

Hey, put down those fireworks! It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye!

Twitter killed the video star

Or so Christopher Weingarten (high profile music critic, writes for Rolling Stone, et al) would have us believe.

The dude says some interesting things, so check out the video. There's also this response.

Ah, what the hell, let's go for the hat trick. Exhibit no. 3 is the following statement from Arnold Schoenberg, as quoted by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise:

Art is from the outset naturally not for the people. But one wants to force it to be. Everyone is supposed to have their say. For the new bliss consists of the right to speak: free speech! Oh God!

Oh God, indeed! Interesting juxtapositions.

Of course, that Schoenberg statement won't be relevant in the context of this post if you haven't actually checked out the Weingarten video. Never fear! For those of you with no time to watch, here are some excerpts, along with my (probably unhelpful but definitely not snarky) commentary:

"And then around 2004, 2005, everyone got a music blog [...] and guys like me got scared, and editors got scared, because people were doing our job for free."

(Aside: Yes! 2004, baby! Hard to believe I've been doing this blog for almost five years, or that my first post was so, well, unceremonious.)

"Music writers and editors became a filter for trends on blogs. [...] Magazines and websites don't discover bands, they just report on trends. The blogger hive mind does the filtering and the critic reported on it."

The observation here seems to be that the epicenter of the critical community has shifted somewhat, from the "official" publications, to the blogs. Of course, from the perspective of the artist, that's not a huge difference, in that there are still critical gatekeepers -- they are just farther down the food chain. (And with that metaphor I don't mean to suggest that the music blogs are inferior. Though some of them may be.)

"You don't need a critic to tell you if something is good; you can listen to it."

Hasn't it been ever so?

"All a music review does now is reinforce the opinion that somebody already has."

By which I think he means that there is a bit of a herd mentality going on in music blog-land, and that the traditional publications have to follow that herd, because that's what people want to read. Also: that there is very little reasoned advocacy going on in music writing as a whole.

"One of the unfortunate side-effects of the lack of critic culture is that people are getting more stratified and separated in their listening habits. [...] It's harder to get exposed to things that aren't in your comfort zone. [...] that dude John [...] was up here saying that Twitter makes it easy to find stuff that pertains to you, and he thinks that's awesome. That's the fucking problem. [...] I can always learn about stuff that's important to me, that's easy. I want to learn about stuff that isn't important to me. I want to be exposed to things. Crowd sourcing killed punk rock, hands down. Crowd sourcing kills art. [...] It's bullshit. You want to know why? Cuz crowds have terrible taste. [...] it's all this music that rises to the middle. [...] It's not the music that's the best, it's the music that the most people can stand [...] if you let the people decide, then nothing truly adventurous ever gets out."

This is the money quote, of course. (See Schoenberg, above.)

Holy cow, the question of genre stratification continually vexes me. I guess it's because, the older the Industrial Jazz Group gets, the more we seem to evolve into some kind of weird, idiosyncratic, syncretic-eclectic monster. Which is a little harder to sell to an audience that likes its genres stratified. (Not saying I think Weingarten is necessarily right. But he may be. Anyway.)

"No one said why these bands were great. [...] and that's what we're missing in a world without critics: the because. #musicmonday is another example: it's just [a list of] artist names and song titles. Lots of who, but no why."

Okay, fair enough. This is the complaint of most college writing instructors, too -- it's the distinction between asserting something and making an argument for it.

Of course (and now I'm going off on a tangent): lately, even those pieces of music writing that are argument-based seem to me to be reducible to a two-step process. First, establish (or choose) a set of criteria. Next, examine how well a given work matches up to that criteria. Which seems to me to be both 1. easy to do, and 2. not very interesting. I wish more critics would apply the "why" question to the selection of the criteria itself.

But I'll have to develop that idea in another post.

A post on polkas

Over at the other blog.

I will soon explain why that blog is even there.

Also: big shout-out to Nate Trier for being the only jazz/new music blogger I know of to actually notice (or care?) that the polka category has been eliminated as a Grammy category by the Recording Academy.

Completely eliminated. Gone. Kaput.

It's a goddamned shame, that's what it is.

(Photo credit.)

The song that dare not speak its name

It's been a while since I've thrown together one of my infamous little videos, eh?

Here's the latest, assembled absent-mindedly this weekend:



It's actually a portion of one of the longer tunes on our last album. A part two will be forthcoming. (Note that part one and two of the video do not exactly correlate with part one and two of the song.)

Most of the live footage comes from our 2008 California tour, and was shot in LA, San Diego, and Sacramento, by Tany's boyfriend, Tristan.

Can you identify the other source material? As usual, it's all culled from the never-ending smorgasbord of fun that is the Internet archive. (Any self-respecting fan of vintage melodramatic cheese should be able to recognize at least one of the black and white clips that appears here.)

The tune does have a name, but just in case your boss is looking over your shoulder reading this, and just in case you're afraid that dirty words will burn holes in his or her eyeballs, let's just call it "Darn the Dirt."

Oh wait, never mind, there's the actual title right there in the YouTube frame. Ah, well.

Enjoy! Er, I mean: "Enjoy?"

We are the world, and we suck

I won't be breaking any news if I start off by saying what you know already: this week (and Thursday, in particular) the world lost two super-famous people, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Three, if you count Ed McMahon. (By pure coincidence, I spent much of yesterday practicing the music I need to play for a funeral today.)

Insert here the usual caveat about how there is more pressing stuff going on in the world. Still, all three departures were pretty fucking dramatic and sad. And Michael Jackson, as the lone musician in the group, is probably the one I should try to say something artistically insightful about.

Instead, I find myself wondering what really killed him.

I'm not talking about what the autopsy will reveal (thanks anyway, Dr. Gupta). I'm talking about the music business in particular, and the mass consumption of art in general. I'm talking about the media machine and its peculiar bloodlusts. And I'm talking about me and you: music fans who buy into and prop up stupid ideas like "the king of pop."

There's complicity enough to go around. Jackson himself made a number of really bad choices. But it's not enough to simply write him off as a crazy dude who is alone responsible for his fate. He was also a product of a system that we all (any of us who ever bought a record or watched MTV, anyway) participated in.

To you Jackson haters: can you, in your heart of hearts, guarantee that you would not eventually go off the deep end if one of your parental units brutally forced you into a professional entertainment career before you knew the first goddamn thing about the world? Can you guarantee your continued sanity if you turned out to be so famous that meaningful personal relationships became problematic, or even impossible? Are you that strong and imperturbable? Really?

To you Jackson fans: can you, in your heart of hearts, guarantee that you would love Jackson's music nearly as much if he had never sold millions, or billions, or however-the-fuck-many records? Did your love of his music (or him) depend on (or at least correlate with) his fame? No? Well, he evidently thought it did. Where did he get that idea?

I know it's important to focus on the music, but dig: the way the music was loved ultimately helped ensure that there wasn't more of it. So the fame problem became a musical problem.

There has been talk about how Jackson, in his bizarre later life, was the victim of enablers who infiltrated his inner circle. But we were all enablers. I mean, shit: even in death everyone wants a piece of this man. It was fascinating (and a little disturbing) to watch the explosion of furtive status updates across Facebook and Twitter as the news emerged yesterday: and the frenzy that obtained as people tried to confirm the initial TMZ report occasionally gave way to a sense of, well, petulant entitlement. Some people actually seemed pissed off that they were not immediately informed as soon as Jackson was gone. As if the news was really about them, or someone close to them.

So it's the culture, stupid. Andrew Sullivan has what seems to me to be the best obit so far, because he makes precisely this point:

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell. [...]

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

Yes, it chewed him up and spat him out. That's it exactly. Except that we're still chewing. Now I see people smiling, laughing, dancing outside the hospital. Now I see the smug broadcasters playing their part like predictable actors in some sick, tired play. Jackson was preparing for a "comeback tour," but in a way, this is the "greatest" comeback he could have devised, according to the rules of the game. In premature death, his fate is now sealed.

One of the hallmarks of the digital age has (supposedly) been the gradual erosion of the music industry star system. That was the world Jackson inhabited. Is it going to finally die with him? Cuz in the long run, it isn't doing anybody any good.

Anyway, RIP.

I blame Guitar Hero

Kidding, of course. Still, it turns out this may not be the best time to plan an unprecedentedly long, 3000-miles-from-home tour for a band that is, to put it kindly, financially unwieldy.

I mean, financial unwieldiness is bad enough. But financially unwieldiness in the middle of a massive economic downturn? Oy.

Anyway, consider:

"There are persistent patterns of decline in participation for most art forms."

"Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater, and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline."

"Audiences for jazz and classical music are substantially older than before....Since 1982, young adult (18-24) attendance rates for jazz and classical music have declined the most, compared with other art forms."

I give you my word that I'm not turning to popular music as a reference point for the IJG out of some kind of crass desire for superficial, material success. But with stats like that, could you blame me if I was?

The Greg Sandow piece cited above is well worth reading in its entirety, as is the NEA report it riffs on.

[Photo credit: "The Smile of a Man with a Wild Fan Base," by notsogoodphotography on Flickr.]

Ice cream and other stuff

Wow, the very excellent Chris Schlarb has an awesome project here.

Throw him a buck or two, damnit.

Speaking of ice cream vendors, here's one from our first east coast tour, back in 2005*. (What's that, you say? 2005 was only four years ago? Hard for me to believe.)

Speaking of east coast tours, we have another one coming up in October. (What's that you say? We're crazy? Yes, I know.)

Speaking of that upcoming tour, here are the outlines of our itinerary. I expect to start filling in the other dates very soon. Let us know if you'd like us to come to your (east coast) town.

I also expect to get back to the regular blogging thing soon. (Like maybe even tonight. Booking a tour can be a little time-consuming, is all.)

I also expect to get a mad rush from the fact that PJCE is doing another one of my silly tunes for their July concert.

More on everything soon.

(Whoops, there I go running my mouth again. Gotta focus, Durkin! Tour booking first, aesthetic debates later!)

*Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Of course I would love to write a song called "Mr. Ding-a-ling," but a better musician beat me to a better variation on that title:

Having a thing

Speaking of rituals of validation, Google Reader just handed me this interesting post by east-coast trumpeter Jason Palmer. It touches on the time-honored critical use of the word "voice" (usually paired with the word "original") as a way of praising (or conferring worth on) a given work.

The (or my) question is: nowadays, how does one recognize such a thing?

I frequently read album reviews of artists that are in my generation (25-35). Many of the writers proclaim that the artist doesn’t quite have their own “voice” or that the artist is still in the process of finding his/her own “voice”. Whenever I read a statement like this I can’t help but wonder if the writer were to put the record on repeat and listen to it all day, day in and day out (no one I know has time for this, but you know what I mean), would that artist then have their own “voice” in the view of the writer’s mind’s ear?

Good question. Is the ability to recognize a musical voice (particularly a "new" and / or "original" voice) akin to the process of learning a new language? Does it involve, you know, hard work?

That "no one I know has time for this" is actually pretty important. I strongly suspect that if you factor in whatever gets counted as "indie" (and maybe even if you don't), there is much more recorded music being produced today than, say, forty years ago. Who has time to listen to it all? And yet, if you can't listen to it all, how do you know what an original voice is? ("Original voice" would have to be defined in the context of "all recorded music," no?)

For me, it is all related to definitions of "listening." I have read about critics dismissing a disc after two or three spins in the car. Huh? Have they really heard the thing? I realize, of course, that this is a strategy for making the review glut more manageable -- as the review copies start to pile up, one reaches for any excuse to cross an item off the list, and thus get closer to a feeling of "critical mastery" (a pretty elusive feeling in this day and age). But come on! Some of my current favorite recordings have taken weeks (or even months) for me to warm up to -- time that involved listening in different contexts, and usually (at some point) setting aside an evening for deep listening with headphones.

(Which is not to say that there isn't some music that I pretty much know on first listen is never really gonna resonate with me.)

In the long run we want to be remembered for having our own “thing”. I’ve heard some say that the age of obtaining a personal unique style of improvising [or composing?] in jazz is gone. I don’t really agree with that assessment [...]

Me neither. But I do wonder if it is getting harder to recognize "a thing" when we hear it.

You wonder why I love this town?

Because a high school music program fundraiser can get away with programming a group called Starfucker. Call me crazy, but that seems pretty hip.

I should be careful what I wish for

Go Trent.

(Maybe it ain't so bad being obscure and mysterious.)

The anxiety of influence

Just read an interesting interview with one Mr. William Joel -- who, for better or worse, was a key influence during my senior year in high school.

Don't roll your eyes -- I've written about this before.

(I'm convinced that my girlfriend at the time was only interested in me because I could play the piano in a style somewhat similar to that of Mr. Joel. I still find it oddly fitting that our relationship fizzled right around the time he stopped making albums regularly. But for a while there, Billy Joel helped me to get laid, and for that alone, I am grateful.)

Anyway, kudos to Marc Myers for posting such a thing on a jazz blog, of all places. (Apparently, the Joel interview stemmed from a previous interview with Phil Woods, who played the various solos that would be smushed together by Phil Ramone into a single Frankenstein solo for Joel's iconic "Just the Way You Are.")

If I'm hesitant to admit that I was once obsessed with Joel's work (please note that better pianists than I have no such compunctions), it may have something to do with commentary like this (excerpted from the JazzWax interview):

Billy Joel's relationship with jazz fans has always been a bit tenuous. Much of the rancor dates back to Billy's 1978 album 52nd Street. With jazz on the ropes in the late 1970s, Billy's followup album to The Stranger featured the young singer-songwriter standing on the cover holding a trumpet and posing in a New York City alley. Though Freddie Hubbard played on one of the album's tracks, 52nd Street's cover sent an unintentional and chilling message: Rock's dominance of the music business was so complete that one of its stars felt comfortable enough posing as a jazz legend. In effect, the rocker was perceived by jazz fans as using their art form as a kitschy prop, which only rubbed salt in a festering wound.

Woah. I'll admit it: I wasn't exactly hip to these issues the first time I heard this record (in the mid-80s, years after it actually came out).

Of course, now I can see how a photo of a rock musician posing with a horn he couldn't actually play, on a famous bebop street, on the cover of a Grammy-winning hit album, might be read as a subtle but gratuitous dig at jazz, especially during what may have seemed (to some) like a low period for the latter genre. And as a musician who has tried to "pass" on both sides of the jazz / rock divide (I have described myself as both a "songwriter" and a "composer"), I get it. The jazzer in me thinks it is patently unfair that the rockers get the lion's share of the money and the fame. (And the rocker in me thinks it is patently unfair that the jazzers get the lion's share of "serious" critical consideration -- but that's an issue for another post.)

But "rancor"? Wow! I mean, if Joel really wanted to put down jazz, one wonders why Freddie Hubbard appears on 52nd Street at all. (Why not, say, Herb Alpert?) Hell, shouldn't Joel have been stepping on the trumpet instead of merely holding it?

More importantly, I have to ask: was it Billy Joel's fault that rock "dominated" the music business in the 70s? If he was just making the music he wanted to make, was he to blame if it happened to sell? And is it his fault if, today, one large subset of his fans seem to be people who, as a general rule, don't really care about music at all? (Cuz, ya know, I see a lot of those same people at the jazz festivals, too.)

One other thing struck me about this interview:

JW: Thinking about recording a jazz album?
BJ: No. I’m not good enough.

JW: Oh give me a break...
BJ: No I’m not. I’m really not that good a piano player.

Huh? What's the subtext here? That it would be supercool if Joel ultimately put his time, effort, and talent into... jazz? (Really, Billy? You don't think you could play jazz well? As talented as you are? I find that hard to believe!)

I guess I can't blame Myers for pursuing this line of questioning, JW being a jazz blog and all. I'm sure it was a completely innocent gesture. But at the same time, it just seemed a little strange to me.

I mean, I like it when artists try to cross over or hybridize. Like, for instance, when a nascent singer-songwriter does his best heavy metal impression! That's my aesthetic schtick too, right? But at the same time I guess I'm not terribly interested whether the rockers I like (or the R&B/soul artists, or whoever) can play jazz. I have never cared whether they harbored secret bona fide "jazz chops." And, by the way, not to get off on a tangent, but I have never thought of using the possibility (or fact) that they did as a legitimization for my admiration of their work.

Maybe I'm funny that way!

The provider

Our first egg arrived this weekend.

Timing is everything

Slowly pushing my way (a few years late) through Alex Ross's book (slowly, because I am simultaneously planning a tour / prepping a record for a full-on mix). As you probably already knew, it is a phenomenal work.

As with that other tome in my current reading rotation, I will be sure to fold in more detailed book-related observations on this blog at some point. But for the time being, this:

Ives wisely waited until 1920 before trying seriously to publicize his modern Transcendentalist style. Ten years earlier, his work would have made little sense to listeners reared on the courtly values of the Gilded Age. But in the period of the Roaring Twenties there emerged what the scholar Carol Oja has called a "marketplace for modernism," an audience more receptive to disruptive sounds.

Cawing trombone glissandos defined the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's 1917 track "Livery Stable Blues," the first jazz record to capture national attention. Around the same time, audiences were cheering the immigrant Ukrainian pianist-composer Leo Ornsteing, a.k.a. "Ornstein the Keyboard Terror," who offered up savage discords and slam-bang virtuosity. Ornstein's most startling effect, co-invented with the California experimentalist Henry Cowell, was the "cluster chord," in which three or more adjacent notes are struck with the hand, the fist, or the forearm. Somehow, Ornstein succeeded in generating an early form of the mass hysteria that would later greet Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. One crowd was said to have "mobbed the lobbies, marched at intervals to the stage, and long clung there to walls, to organ-pipes, pedal-base, stairs, or any niche offering a view." (p. 147)

All in good time, my fellow thong-wearing, noisy, dancing big bands. Our marketplace will come.

All I have are questions

For some reason, I'm still chewing on this MOPDtK review. Kind of funny, because I don't even know the group all that well. They do seem like kindred spirits of a sort, but I haven't yet absorbed much of their music (er, "moosic").

It doesn't really matter for what follows, though. I don't want to harp on the Peter Hum piece (honestly, I have no beef with Mr. Hum -- in fact, I think he's a terrific writer), but the arguments it contains seem to me to be representative of a broader view in the jazz critical cognoscenti. Which is not to deny Hum's point that MOPDtK have achieved "critical darling" status. It's just that I have heard the same complaints about "schtick" and lack-of-substance coming from the Bagatellens and One Final Notes of the world -- the sort of publications that bestowed that same critical darling status Hum is resisting. This suggests that there is a more broadly-held critical perspective at work here, one that informs both "progressive" and "conservative" jazz fans.

Maybe this is the bit to address:

[...] I have to thank [MOPDTK] for making me realize that my appetite for musical deconstruction and exaggerated playing, heavy on effect and yuks, is definitely more limited than it once was. Too frequently on This Is Our Moosic, so many solos go to the same place. A horn overblows. The drums skitter and clatter. The band presses the schtick button. I may be too much caught up in "value" and "quality" lacking a sense of "fun," but I find these moves to be easy ways out, substitutes for more surprising and substantial musical developments. MOPDTK has its concept, rooted in music that most likely doesn't do much for me either, but the group, beyond its funhouse esthetic, seems to me to be accessing musical cliches of its own, as much as any well-worn tri-tone substitution or earnestly intended Art Blakey shuffle might be for jazz musicians who aspire to more mainstream, and dare I say serious, beauties.

And so, I'll address it:

How exactly does one identify a musical "yuk"?

What is "overblowing" in the context of MOPDtK, and why is it bad, exactly? What is "skittering and clattering" in the context of MOPDtK, and why are they bad, exactly? (I sometimes wish critics were forced to provide sound clips to accompany every statement.)

Does the suggestion that "the schtick button" is an "easy way out" mean that art is always supposed to be hard? And what does it mean to suggest that art can either be "easy" or "hard"? Mozart seemed to be able to fart out great music -- how does that square with the concept of taking the "easy way out"?

What if the word "schtick" is like the word "queer" -- used to denigrate an aesthetic approach or lifestyle one disagrees with, but ultimately reclaim-able as a positive value by the practitioners of that approach or lifestyle? Or, in the context of this review, is it an irredeemable term, meant to convey the idea that MOPDtK literally want to swindle audiences?

Are "value" and "quality" mutually exclusive from the concept of "fun"?

Is it the critic's job to express things with certainty? Is it the critic's job to persuade? What's the difference between a critic and a publicist?

How many times must something be repeated (and for whom?) before it becomes a cliche?

Is it wrong to love something without understanding why? Is it (ever?) enough to love something without understanding why? When?

Rhetorical questions, perhaps. Still, I'll try to unpack 'em in the days ahead. Or maybe you can do it for me.

Winging it

Much jazz-oriented criticism seems to rely on the notion of "spontaneity" (and determines value based on who has it and who doesn't). But lately I've been wondering what that means, exactly, and whether there isn't a certain amount of semantic prestidigitation going on whenever someone invokes the term as a means of praising some artist or other. (Okay, "whether there isn't" is maybe a little coy of me -- I should've written "of course there is a certain amount of semantic prestidigitation going on whenever someone invokes the term as a means of praising some artist or other.")

Let me try that again: I've been getting the feeling lately that "spontaneity" is one of the more unexamined concepts in the jazz lexicon.

Consider, for instance, this less-than-enthusiastic review of the band Mostly Other People Do the Killing, by Peter Hum.

Hum is an observant, articulate writer. I can't begrudge him his taste (though I may have more to say about this piece at some point, because some of the problems he has with MOPDtK are criticisms that people have leveled at the IJG as well). But I seem to have a deeper resistance to comments like these:

To my ears, many post-Coltrane and European improvisers, consumed by finding new and even unconventional sounds as improvisors, rejoice in tossing structure, tonality and rhythm out the window. They might contend that they have enlarged our definition of "beautiful," burying outdated sounds and social significances in the process. And yet, some of the tropes of their music, say piano pummeling or saxophonic overblowing, I would contend, have since become codified, making free jazz that is nonetheless dependent on a set of fall-back musical moves. Meanwhile, musicians such as Keith Jarrett have played utterly spontaneous music -- free, right? -- even as they adhered to song forms and all the conventional beauties of melody, harmony and rhythm.

It's hard for me to imagine that anything played by a professional musician, particularly one as experienced as Keith Jarrett or Ornette Coleman, could ever be "utterly spontaneous." I mean, think about that phrase for a second. It suggests that years of performance and listening history, years of artistic backstory, years of being engaged and in the world, can somehow be abandoned, at even a subconscious level. As if environmental factors can be made completely irrelevant when it comes to expression.

Which is not to say that it is not worth pursuing "utter spontaneity," or employing it as a metaphor, or even that sometimes things might sound utterly spontaneous -- but that's exactly the problem. The old platitude is based in truth: what sounds "spontaneous" to me might not sound "spontaneous" to you. And if we assume that something that sounds "utterly spontaneous" is utterly spontaneous -- just because the artist (or his / her marketing materials) tell us it is so -- we are probably being duped. Cuz y'know: every utterance is inevitably informed to some extent by external factors.

(I don't have a solution to this problem, of couse; I'm just content with pointing it out.)

Speaking of Jarrett, by the way, no one is more flabbergasted than me that "Incident at Umbria" is the IJG's most-viewed video (by far) on YouTube. Like, we've passed 8,000 views. For us, that's pretty freaking amazing -- and kind of exasperating, too, cuz, you know, I have written plenty better things than that. Anyway, check out the comments if you have the time. There has been a bit of an "exchange."